


Tous les Chemins (All the roads)

by AppleSharon



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997), Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: Aerti as a secondary pairing, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Pining, Resolved Sexual Tension, Romance, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:34:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23850142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AppleSharon/pseuds/AppleSharon
Summary: "You’re welcome, Spikey,” Zack says breathlessly, running his hands down Cloud’s waist, pulling him in loosely. Their noses touch.“Every time. I’ll save you every time.”Cloud chokes back a sob and nods.Zack Fair and Cloud Strife meet each other over hundreds of different timelines. They all end with them in love. They all end with at least one of them dead.It's time for Zack, Cloud, and Aerith to break the cycle. (A loose Remake explanation/interpretation)
Relationships: Aerith Gainsborough/Tifa Lockhart, Zack Fair & Aerith Gainsborough & Cloud Strife, Zack Fair/Cloud Strife
Comments: 87
Kudos: 312





	1. Cloud Strife

**Author's Note:**

> Having played through Remake, I just can't get this idea out of my head.
> 
> Final Fantasy VII and VII Remake spoilers and dialogue. Crisis Core spoilers and dialogue. Before Crisis spoilers and dialogue.

It’s raining. 

“Almost there, Cloud. We’re almost there.”

The sun shines through a cloudburst as he limps on, Cloud loosely draped over his shoulders. 

_Zack._

Memories flood Cloud’s mind. His feet shuffle slowly against the dirt in an attempt to walk alongside Zack but the rest of his body won’t move. Raindrops run down his face in slow rivulets. They glance off of his shoulderguards and chapped lips.

_You should have left me._

Yet all that comes out of Cloud’s mouth is an incomprehensible mumble. Zack laughs. 

“Almost, Spikey. And then you can meet Aerith. She’ll be able to help you. You’ll love her, I promise.”

_Aerith._

That name sounds so familiar. The horizon blurs.

_How many times have I?_

***

The faucet in his apartment has a drip in it. Cloud thought that Tifa changing his water filter would have fixed it, but that night he lies in bed, he can hear the water hitting the shallow, cracked basin. The sound reminds him of rain falling.

When he closes his eyes, he hears rain hitting dry, cracked earth and smells mud and blood and the sickly-sweet smell of mako. 

_I miss you._

He knows that voice. It’s as familiar to him as his own, but he doesn’t know who it belongs to or why he knows it so well.

***

Zack is waiting at the bar for them when they return from the reactor, Jessie still muttering about explosives under her breath.

“Zack! You’re awake!”

Cloud ignores the part of his brain screaming at him for stating the obvious. Being around Zack encouraged him to speak more than being around anyone else, but his words still stutter and trip out of his mouth in awkward, unfinished sentences, even after all of this time.

“C’mon spikey, didn’t your mother teach you it’s not polite to stare?”

Zack’s voice is in his ear and his hand is in his hair and Cloud wraps his arms around him, burying his face in Zack’s chest. 

“Tifa patched me up real good, Cloud. I don’t know why you didn’t say hello when she was our guide in Nibel—“ 

There’s a sharp pain at his temple.

“Cloud?”

Tifa’s voice is hesitant, like there’s something else she wants to say but is afraid to say it. She stops moving her cocktail shaker, and leans over the bar to look at him closely. 

“It’s nothing.” 

Cloud shakes his head and looks around the bar. It’s empty. Even Marlene has gone downstairs through the pinball machine elevator with Barrett and the others. A soft, jazzy tune plays from the jukebox. 

Tifa opens her mouth as if to push him further, but only nods and begins shaking his drink once more. 

Cloud stares at the empty stool next to him. The wood is worn in the centre, like someone sits there regularly, enough to make it their own.

***

“Hellooooooo,” she says.

_No. That isn’t right. That was—_

“Maybe you’re not okay.”

_That’s better._

Cloud is certain that he was dreaming a moment ago, but now he’s in a field of flowers. They smell familiar and a sudden pang of regret tears painfully through his chest. He jerks backwards, away from prying green eyes. The flowers are soft and easily crushed. He can almost feel the petals through his gloves, fingertips yellow with pollen. 

He’s definitely smelled them before. 

“Ah, he lives! Finally awake now are we?”

_Aerith_

“You’re?” His voice is unsteady. It cracks. 

“Aerith. It’s Aerith. And you are?”

_Zack_

“Cloud.”

“Nice to meet you again.”

“‘Again’ hunh?”

“What? You don’t remember? What about the flowers?”

Later that night, Cloud stares at a vase of Aerith’s flowers in the corner of a room and wonders about ‘again.’ Sometimes Aerith said things that sounded so familiar, as if he’d heard them once before. 

“Pretty crazy hunh?” Aerith had said. “Us meeting like this again. You should stay a while.”

Again, like they’d met in the slums days before.

Again, like he’d fallen through the church roof after a fight with—

A fight with who?

A friend?

No he had been at a reactor. They had fought Heidegger’s machine and he had fallen from the plate. Just like that time.

No, he had only fallen through the plate once, that he could remember anyway. He tries to remember what had happened before Tifa had found him in Midgar, but his mind is filled with a blinding white and a high-pitched noise. 

He slowly tiptoes out of the room to find a broom, several metal pails, a toolbox, and another flower vase on the floor leading to the stairs. 

Cloud groans. It was difficult enough to avoid Elmyra’s piercing stare without having to deal with Aerith’s pranks. He would just have to step around all of the junk in order to make his escape.

***

After nearly vomiting on the helicopter ride — he’d effectively held his breath, pinched his nose, anything to keep his breakfast from making a reappearance in front of a first-class SOLDIER and the Turks’ Tseng — the mountain air in Modeo clears his head.

He walks alongside Zack Fair, relishing in the chance to stay in step with a SOLDIER, especially one as high-profile as Zack. Cloud glances over at him several times, but Zack’s attention is always focused forward. At least until he turns around.

“Yo, don’t fall too far behind!” Zack yells back at Tseng and another infantryman. “At least someone’s keeping up!”

Zack’s voice is warm. It washes over him comfortably, with a slight accent. 

“Well, I’m a country boy too,” Cloud manages to say. He regrets it immediately. Someone like Zack isn’t going to care about who he is or where he’s from.

Yet his answering smile is beautiful. 

“Where are you from?” Zack asks, walking ahead of Cloud to face him.

“Nibelheim.”

***

_You fell from the sky. Scared me._

She points up at the roof like she did the last time he fell through.

_The last time? No, that was—_

“Fell right into my flower bed. Lucky for you.” Aerith pauses. “Like, really."

“S-sorry, I didn’t mean to—“

His voice is stuttering again. What was it that he should have said?

_So you saved me hunh?_

_I have to repay you somehow. Hey, how about one date?_

Don’t worry about it,” she says. “They’re a lot tougher than they look. This place, it has a kind of power.”

Maybe that’s why his head suddenly feels so foggy. Cloud watches as the crushed petals slowly move up and outward, springing back to life. Her voice is far away. It sounds like it’s coming from underwater as she talks about materia. He closes his eyes and sees her ribbon on the ground, falling materia, and blood. There’s so much blood.

 _Keep up Cloud._

That voice in his head again. It’s a deeper, male voice that he recognizes, but can’t place. 

“Bet you just don’t know how to use it,” Cloud says.

Aerith continues talking, filling the space between them that isn’t moldy floorboards covered with flowers. 

_Keep up._

“I’ll see myself in, thanks.”

Another familiar voice, more high-pitched than the one in his head. It belongs to a skinny redhead walking towards them with an electric prod. Cloud instinctively steps in front of Aerith, who doesn’t seem nearly as scared as she should be in a situation involving, involving—

_The Turks_

“And who are you?” The redhead asks.

“He’s my bodyguard!”

_I am? Yeah, I am._

“And a SOLDIER. Pretty cool, hunh?”

Cloud bites back an automatic response that being in SOLDIER isn’t ‘cool’ but remembers what he told Tifa at the well as a kid. He wanted to be a SOLDIER once, just like Sephiroth. 

“A SOLDIER?”

“Ex-SOLDIER.” Cloud responds before he can bite his tongue completely. 

“Well, whaddya know. You’ve got the eyes at least.”

Another high-pitched sound reverberates in Cloud’s ears. Tanks, large tanks full of mako. His SOLDIER treatments? He remembers—

_Keep up, Spikey._

Cloud opens his mouth to retort that he is keeping up when Aerith steps in front of him.

“You don’t mind, do you? Bodyguard work’s not too different from merc stuff, right?”

_How did you know what I—_

“I guessed!” Aerith responds without him saying anything aloud, as if she’s trying to rush the situation along. “From the sword! Just do this for me, okay?”

“Fine, but it’ll cost you, a lot.”

“A lot, hunh? One date ought to do it!”

She sounds so happy about it, being the one who offers the date this time.

_This time?_

***

The faucet in their apartment has a drip in it. Zack changes it as their first order of business before they help Tifa with her rounds through the Sector 7 slums.

The dripping sound disappears. Cloud can’t help but come up from behind Zack, hugging him while he rests his head on Zack’s shoulder. Zack leans into the touch, rubbing his cheek against Cloud’s.

“I told ya, you’d get that growth spurt.”

“Some of it faster than expected,” Cloud mumbles, breath hitching just next to Zack’s ear. “Zack, I—“

Zack interrupts him. Whirling around, he pulls Cloud in for a messy kiss. It’s like the first time in Modeoheim. Or Nibelheim. Or stumbling into Zack’s door at night, soft promises that Zack won’t make Cloud break curfew again this time.

Cloud always broke curfew. Every time. 

“You’re welcome, Spikey,” Zack says breathlessly, running his hands down Cloud’s waist, pulling him in loosely. Their noses touch. 

“Every time. I’ll save you every time.”

Cloud chokes back a sob and nods. Zack returns his watery smile, bringing him in for another hug.

“Let’s go help Tifa, okay?”

***

There’s no debris stacked outside the door this time as Cloud sneaks out of Elmyra’s house again, following Aerith down the stairs. She cannot possibly be here and yet, she is, leading him into the garden, full of fireflies and a mako-bright aurora in the sky.

 _They’re souls returning to the Lifestream,_ the voice in his head tells him. 

“Is this a dream?” he asks Aerith, once he reaches her on the hill. He wonders if the flowers have responded to her yet. 

_You’re not dreaming, because you are—_

“Maybe,” Aerith says as she stands up. Her skirt is covered in dirt patches where her knees are. “You tell me.”

“You okay?”

“Don’t I look it?” Aerith responds quickly and blithely. 

_She’s not okay. Ask her about—_

“I used to live in the ShinRa building, back when I was really little.”

“Your mom told us,” Cloud says. He’s dizzy with the cloying smell of flowers. The sickly-sweet taste of mako is in his mouth and he almost gags as he looks up at the green sky above Aerith’s head. She’s saying something but he can’t hear it properly. 

“So what, you want to stay?” He asks incredulously. She was saying something about it feeling like home. 

_Listen. I never did. You have the chance to listen now. Listen, for me._

“C’mon Cloud, don’t be silly.”

There’s something about this that feels impossibly familiar to Cloud, like he’s lived through this again and again and has never gotten it right once. She asks if he was worried about her.

“Of course I am,” he responds immediately. 

“I’m sorry about that,” she says. “Really.”

_Don’t let her apologize._

Cloud shakes his head. He opens his mouth to respond but she’s looking off in the distance and praying.

“Everyone dies eventually,” she says, arms still clasped together. 

The flowers feel soft underneath his feet, as if he can feel them through his boots. It’s just like the church in the slums. 

“I suppose.”

“So we need to make the most of the time we have— to live our lives the way we wanna live. Every minute, every moment, matters.”

_How many times has she said this to you, Spikey? Listen._

“I’ll remember that,” he says. He hopes it’s not as inadequate of a response as it feels to him. “You need to embrace this moment. Right?”

Cloud tacks this on at the end of his sentence, if only to keep the conversation moving, keep her from vanishing, or from him waking up in an empty bed in Elmyra’s house. 

“I’m glad I met you, Cloud. I really am. I’m grateful for all of the words we’ve shared. All of the moments, and all of the memories. You’ve made me more happy than you know.”

_You’ve made me more happy than you know._

The words rush around inside his head, only instead of Aerith’s voice, it’s his voice — dark hair, mako-bright eyes, and a sleepy smile as he tousles Cloud’s hair in the morning. A sweaty smell that is so familiar and momentarily clears his mind from the too-sweet smell of flowers and mako and the Lifestream as thousands of souls rise from the ruins of Sector 7. 

_How many times?_

Aerith is still talking. It’s like she’s talking to him, but also talking through him, to the part of him that isn’t really Cloud. Isn’t really—

“But whatever happens, you can’t fall in love with me.”

She reaches for his cheek. Cloud swallows the urge to step backwards, away from her. He’s still nauseous, and can taste the mako on his tongue. 

“Even if you think you have, it’s not real.”

_Because you love—_

***

The tanks below Sector 7 look just like the ones in the basement of the Nibelheim Mansion. Cloud peers through a hole in the concrete, still hot from Barrett’s gun as the walls slowly crumble and cave in.

A series of mako tanks. A dead body, crumpled at the bottom. 

“Oh god, were those—“ Tifa’s voice falls away as Cloud hears someone scream. 

A body falls forward onto the metal catwalk of the Nibelheim Reactor. Sephiroth looks on in horror.

He’s floating. The sun blinds him as feathers fall from the sky. He pounds on the glass of his tank until it gives way. 

_Cloud._ The voice is warm and sad, wavering with unshed tears.

“Yeah, that’s the ShinRa I know,” Cloud says bitterly.

_I was here. No, we were—_

***

Zack is talking to him again. He’s telling another story about him and Angeal Hewley. Cloud knows of Angeal like he knew of Zack before they met. Zack makes him sound like a god sometimes and an older brother at others. It makes Cloud wonder what Angeal was like, before everything.

“I dunno if you can hear me in there,” Zack says. His face is suddenly in front of Cloud’s, staring into his eyes.

_I can hear you. I’m always listening_

“I think you’re getting better at least. You react sometimes, and your eyes move— maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part.”

Cloud has never heard Zack sound as sad as he does in that moment. If there’s one thing he knows, it’s that ShinRa is truly evil to have made Zack — effervescent “puppy dog Zack” as the others called him when Zack was only a dream and not a real person that Cloud knew intimately — sound like that.

 _I’m here. I’m listening! I’m here!_ But his body doesn’t move. 

“You know, Spikey, ever since we met in Modeoheim, I’ve been—“

Zack trails off. 

“You know what, it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you when you wake up, ‘k?”

***

“Almost there, Cloud. We’re almost there.”

The image vanishes before Cloud’s eyes as rain starts to fall.


	2. Aerith Gainsborough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Zack Fair falls through the roof of the church and she flirts a bit more but doesn’t kiss him._
> 
> _Zack dies saving Cloud._
> 
> _Cloud Strife falls through the roof of the church and she flirts even more and sometimes feels badly about how little he understands._
> 
> _She dies again._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow even in this story I can't help but write more Reeve Tuesti content.
> 
> I received a lot of feedback that the first chapter of this was a bit confusing. That was by design, since Cloud is an incredibly unreliable narrator, but hopefully this Aerith chapter clears things up a bit. Zack's perspective is next in Chapter 3, and should clear things up even more with a fully chronological look at one timeline.

**The first attempt.**

Sometimes, Aerith remembers things she’s not supposed to remember, things from her childhood that humans were not supposed to remember from such a young age and things that happened to her parents well before she was born.

When she closes her eyes, she sees a man reaching out to her mother, releasing her from the same room that Aerith and her mother live in now at the Shinra Electric Power Company. They go to an old observatory and then her mother takes him north, to where the calamity fell. Every day, he tells her what he knows and she corrects him. They learn together. 

She knows who the man is from an outsider’s perspective: Professor Gast Faremis. He is an unparalleled geneticist, according to some of the off-handed comments made by the men who come to take her mother away every morning. They complain about Professor Hojo, and wish for Professor Gast to return. 

Sometimes, Aerith wonders if they know that Professor Gast is dead.

His research was never surpassed in its complexity, they say. Nor was it ever approached with the same empathy for all living beings. Yet, her mother doesn’t talk about Gast Faremis’ science experiments. Her mother talks about how much she loved him and how much he loved Aerith. 

Aerith never knew her father, but her mother still speaks of him often. “He was a kind man,” her mother says as she holds Aerith in her lap and strokes her hair. “All he wanted to do was help the planet. And Shinra killed him for it.”

Sometimes, Aerith sees her mother as her mother. And sometimes, Aerith sees her as the last of the Cetra’s Ifalna: Aerith’s living connection to a world with which she can only half-communicate. The voices of the planet are sometimes incomprehensible whispers on top of whispers, but when she holds Ifalna’s hand they suddenly make sense. Then they come to her one-by-one, sharing stories and memories and secrets. Ifalna says that she’ll learn in time, but Aerith doesn’t know how this will be possible. Aeirth can only hear the planet when she’s hand-in-hand with her mother, looking up at her while her mother gazes off into a distance that Aerith cannot see. 

Every morning they take Ifalna away. Every afternoon she returns bruised, angry, and defiant. Aerith never sees her mother look more alive in these moments and it scares her, until they escape and her mother is suddenly more powerful than she’s ever been, until she’s dying on the steps of a train station. 

“Take Aerith somewhere safe,” Ifalna tells a woman who stops to ask if they’re okay. 

That night, in Elmyra Gainsborough’s home, she dreams of her parents. They have a snowball fight in the foothills of the Great Glacier, under the warm streetlamps of Icicle Inn. At night, they stumble into a small home and Gast makes hot chocolate for Ifalna. He falls asleep with his head on her pregnant belly. 

At the end of the dream, she sees them side-by-side. Ifalna’s head is resting on Gast’s shoulder. 

“Stay safe,” Ifalna says. “And don’t worry about us. We’ve returned to the planet together.”

“We will always love you, Aerith,” Gast says.

Aerith wakes up crying.

***

Aerith cannot hear the voices of the planet like she used to.

Even when she goes to the tallest hill in her flower garden, the flowers and the voices are silent. They only come to her again when Elmyra’s husband dies, and then Aerith has to tell Elmyra what happened. The darkness of not knowing holds hope, but not knowing is also tearing Elmyra apart. Aerith sees this every day. Sometime before the voices reach out again, she starts calling Elmyra “Mommy.”

“Mommy don’t be said,” Aerith says, the day after the voices return. “A man you really, really love just died. His heart came a long way to say goodbye.”

Aerith places her hand over her chest. She can feel his love for Elmyra and wishes that she could have met him. 

“But he couldn’t stay because he had to return to the planet.”

***

From the moment Zack Fair falls through the church roof in the Sector 5 undercity, Aerith loves him. He’s bright and effervescent. His willingness to give everything of himself to everyone around him inspires her.

Yet she cannot give the same of herself. 

“Normal is best,” she tells Zack. “At least I think so. Those SOLDIER people are kind of weird.”

When Zack confirms her suspicion that he is in SOLDIER, he leans in close. His eyes are bright with the Lifestream. She could easily lean forward the rest of the way and capture his lips with hers but she doesn’t. 

Aerith sometimes sleeps in the church flowerbed at night rather than returning to Petal Lane despite the fact that it worries Elmyra. She tells herself that she’s waiting for Zack to show up — and sometimes he does — but it’s only in the church that she can hear the planet with any consistency. 

When Zack disappears, she writes him daily. Her letter-writing becomes weekly, then monthly, and finally she’s on her eighty-ninth letter, which she decides will be their final one. 

Zack never returns.

***

From the moment Cloud Strife falls through the church roof of the Sector 5 undercity, Aerith understands.

It happens days after she runs into Cloud on Loveless Street. Days after she sits in front of a small leak in a mako pipe and knows that Zack has returned to the planet.

***

She feels Sephiroth’s anger the moment his Masamune drives through her heart. It’s a righteous fury, different from the cold and calculating voice of Jenova, which drips like a poison through Aerith’s dreams. Sephiroth has reason to be angry.

When Aerith realizes this, she forgives him immediately. She wonders how long Jenova’s voice has dripped through his mind like a poison — perhaps he’s never known a world without it in the creeping darkness of his thoughts.

***

Reuniting with Zack in the Lifestream is like coming home.

He kisses her on the cheek and gives her a hug that surely would have cracked a few ribs back in the world of the living and asks about Cloud. 

Behind him, Gast and Ifalna stand together and welcome her with open arms.

**The second attempt.**

Aerith wakes up back in her room, chalk in hand. It falls from her tiny fingers and breaks on the concrete floor. Dust sprinkles through the air onto a patterned rug her mother had placed to make the room seem more like a home. Her fingers are far too small for an adult woman. She gasps in horror, staring at them.

“Aerith? Did Hojo do something to you earlier? I told them not to touch you!”

Her mother’s voice. Ifalna’s voice. But that’s impossible because her mother is

_dead. She died outside of a train station in the Sector 7 undercity._

alive. 

Aerith chokes back a sob as she runs to her mother and wraps her arms around her as tightly as possible. When she opens her eyes and looks over her mother’s shoulder, Aerith sees shadows flickering in the corners of the room. They’re whispering something to her but she doesn’t understand, even while holding on to Ifalna.

***

She trips in the street as she and Ifalna are running away from the Shinra building and Sector 0. Just as a car is about to bear down on her, something throws her in the air. It’s one of the shadows from their room.

***

Zack Fair falls through the roof of the church and she flirts a bit more but doesn’t kiss him.

Zack dies saving Cloud.

Cloud Strife falls through the roof of the church and she flirts even more and sometimes feels badly about how little he understands. 

She dies again. 

Sephiroth’s anger is the same, but Jenova’s hatred is more palpable. Like Aerith, she knows and she wants to keep this timeline firm, holding the planet hostage. 

Aerith realizes what she has to do.

**The fifth attempt.**

A few weeks after Zack comes crashing through the church ceiling he returns to Aerith with a bedraggled Cloud Strife in tow.

Cloud is skinny and somehow terrified of everything yet quick to anger all at once. When he looks at Zack, his entire face lights up with a soft warmth that makes Aerith happier than she’s ever known. Zack is somehow more bubbly than past iterations, ruffling Cloud’s hair and using every excuse to casually touch the infantryman. 

“I’m going to teach Cloud how to get into SOLDIER!” Zack yells into the thick darkness of the slums one night. They’ve been drinking a bit after helping Aerith sell flowers. Cloud is red-cheeked and wobbly, leaning his head on Zack’s shoulder. 

“I can get in m’self,” he mumbles.

“Awwwww, c’mon Spikey let me help! I can teach you loads of stuff! Angeal taught me—”

Zack’s voice trails off. His drunken pout turns into a genuine frown. Aerith opens her mouth to change the subject, but before she can say anything, Cloud speaks up. 

“S’okay Zack. You can teach me.” His words are slurred and he misses his first attempt at throwing his arm around Zack’s shoulder by a few centimetres. Zack beams, burying his tear-streaked face in Cloud’s hair. 

Aerith recovers from her initial shock at Cloud rushing to cheer Zack up by giggling and poking both of them in the cheek. She loves them both so much. 

That night she kisses them on their foreheads as they snore loudly in Elmyra’s spare bedroom, limbs tangled together on a tiny twin bed. The shadows whisper outside of the house.

**The seventeenth attempt.**

They’re still treating her as a guest for the time being, and place her in the same room where every past version of herself has grown up with Ifalna. She always remembers echoes of her past attempts but they’re obscured, like the voices of the planet. It’s not difficult to sneak out of her unguarded room, although she meets some resistance from the shadows.

The shadows remind her that things could change. She presses onward. 

Aerith runs into Reeve Tuesti’s office assistant on the 63rd floor, just as the young woman is closing the door to his office. She looks down at the marble floor with a long sigh, wiping her forearm across her eyes.

“Are you okay?” Aerith can’t help but reach out to her, taking the woman’s hand in hers. She looks startled, and Aerith feels badly that she cannot remember her name, despite seeing her across several iterations of her life. 

“D-director Tuesti is busy right now,” is all she says in response as she tries to pull away from Aerith. Aerith refuses to let go 

“It will be okay,” Aerith says, holding onto her hand tightly. “Reeve is a good man.”

“Do you… know him?”

Aerith shakes her head. 

_He’s going to help save the world. And I need to see if he can change things sooner because something is wrong._

“I know of him.” Aerith settles on being as honest as she possibly can. “And I think he can help me.”

The red-haired woman shakes her head vehemently. “He’s busy preparing the casualty reports from Sector 7. And after that he needs to draft a reconstruction budget.”

Aerith doesn’t have the heart to tell her that it’s pointless for Reeve to draft anything at all. The rest of the board is not going to listen to him in their meeting tomorrow. 

“I’m Aerith,” she says. “And I’m the Ancient specimen that lives upstairs. They need me for their Neo-Midgar project.”

The woman’s eyes widen to almost comical proportions. Aerith squeezes her hand and sends her a reassuring smile. “I promise, I won’t do anything that puts Reeve— that is, Director Tuesti, in danger.”

“They’ve likely bugged his office. He’s already— He’s already—“

Aerith moves towards the door with the woman in tow. “Let’s go in together, okay?”

The shadows descend, howling in anger. 

When Aerith wakes up, she’s alone and in Hojo’s specimen chamber.

**The ??? attempt.**

Hundreds of tries later, she still remembers their first attempt. It’s seared beneath her eyelids with startling clarity, untouched by any amount of time spent in the Lifestream.

She remembers how unafraid she was to climb down a rope from the edge of the plate, looking up as the stars winked out sight, overtaken by the bright sunrise. She remembers reaching out for Tifa’s hand and holding it tightly. She remembers watching the tears leak out of the corners of Barrett’s eyes and biting back a teasing comment. 

She remembers that looking out at an uncovered sky seemed hopeful.

With every iteration, the plate becomes more soothing.


	3. Zack Fair (fifth timeline)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Cloud,” Zack whispers loudly into the dark even though Cloud is tangled up with him in the same bed._
> 
> _“What?” Cloud answers sleepily._
> 
> _“I like you,” Zack says simply._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is where the M rating comes in for sex and language. 
> 
> Also you may have noticed a chapter increase. This is because this is only one of three full Zack timelines that are coming. This matches up with the fifth timeline shown in Aerith's POV chapter earlier.

Zack Fair meets Cloud Strife in the mess hall. 

When he sees him, it feels like time has stopped. 

_How can one person be so beautiful?_

Zack nearly says this aloud, but stops himself before he looks back up from the mountain of food in his arms and into Cloud’s eyes. They’re a lazy kind of bright blue that is so light-coloured, it reflects everything around them. 

For his part in this monumental moment , Cloud looks confused and anxious, as if Zack is going to start yelling at him any moment. 

Kunsel had warned him not to go to the SOLDIER’s mess at exactly 12:00. Zack had not listened to him, blithely saying that he could easily slip in and out of the lines unnoticed, especially since it would presumably be packed. 

As Zack surveys the crowded room, he immediately realizes that while the latter was true, the former definitely wasn’t. So he hops back into the elevator and goes down one floor to the regular mess hall. For all of the wandering around he does in the Shinra building, Zack rarely has time to stop by the infantrymen’s floor. 

One day he had asked Director Lazard why the infantrymen were so high up in the building to begin with — typically higher floors meant executives or elites. Lazard had awarded him with a withering stare and a snide comment about how he should be less arrogant. Zack hadn’t meant to be arrogant, but that night as he stared at his ceiling, he realized how it could have been seen as arrogance. 

Zack finds what he is looking for — curry bread — in the general mess hall quickly and loads his arms up with as many as he can carry. He finds out later, when he drops them on the floor after bumping into Cloud Strife, that this is a total of fourteen. 

“F-fourteen?” The blond infantryman stutters out between apologies, counting the breads as he helps pick them off of the ground. 

“What?” Zack says, unhelpfully. He stares at the spikes in the infantryman’s hair, marvelling at how they looked so messy and soft at the same time. 

“You…fourteen breads,” he says again. His voice is soft, its volume just above a whisper. Zack can barely hear him over the noise of the mess. 

_How can one person be so beautiful?_

Zack has the wherewithal to look embarrassed at his own gluttony as the infantryman hands him the last bread shyly. 

“Want to sit down together?” Zack blurts out. “I’m Zack, by the way. SOLDIER, first class!” He reaches out to gesture at his chest but only ends up shifting some of the breads in his arms. Two of them fall on the floor again and the infantryman leans down to pick them up. 

“Good thing these are wrapped, hunh?” He says as the infantryman mumbles something about knowing who Zack is.

“Everyone knows the first-class SOLDIERS,” he says quietly, stacking the wayward breads back into Zack’s arms. He blushes and immediately withdraws after accidentally brushing Zack’s arm. 

“What’s your name?” Zack tries again when he realizes that the young man has finished speaking and is now staring at him haplessly, like he’s waiting to be officially dismissed.

“Cloud Strife… sir.” He adds on the title like an afterthought, quickly drawing himself to attention. 

“Want to eat with me? I have extra bread,” Zack jokes. Cloud shakes his head violently. 

“I-I have to go,” he says. “We have drills soon.” 

“You have a western accent!” Zack says, desperately trying to keep the conversation going for as long as possible. “Where are you from?”

“Nibelheim,” Cloud says.

“I’m from Gongaga. Never heard of it!”

Cloud looks at him, confused. “But there’s a reactor in Nibelheim…”

“There’s a reactor in Gongaga too, but that just means that—“

“—there’s nothing else there,” Cloud finishes his sentence in tandem. He looks up into Zack’s eyes for the first time with a tentative smile. Zack grins back helplessly. 

“So, I’ll see you around, Cloud, right?” Zack asks before Cloud can walk away. “Us country boys ought to stick together!” 

He hopes he doesn’t sound too eager, but knows that he did when Cloud only looks at him with more confusion.

“Uh, sure,” Cloud says hesitantly. “I’ll see you around, I guess.”

_How can one person be so beautiful?_

Hours later, Zack repeats this to Kunsel as the two lounge in Zack’s room. 

“How can one person be so beautiful?”

Kunsel scoffs. 

“Do you believe in fate?” Zack asks while snacking on a piece of curry bread. “You were the one who told me not to go to the SOLDIER’s mess but I didn’t listen and then went downstairs to the giant mess hall for all of the other guys.”

“Where did you get that?” Kunsel is practically drooling at the half-eaten bread in Zack’s hand and doesn’t pay attention to Zack’s question at all. 

“Here, you can have it,” Zack says, throwing it across the room from where he’s lying on his bed to Kunsel, seated at his desk chair. “Seriously though, the timing was perfect.”

“Gross, you already took a bite.” 

Despite his protests, Kunsel takes a bite himself, polishing off the rest of the bread in less than a minute. Kunsel sighs as he wipes his mouth gingerly, making sure that the curry paste didn’t end up on his chin or lips. 

“Don’t go on about this too much or you’ll end up like Genesis,” he says. “Quoting LOVELESS all the time and talking about your fated tortured loves of your life. Who also happen to be in the military with you and went through the same weird procedures. Oh and also has clone copies of himself.”

Zack shudders but doesn’t take the bait of asking Kunsel what he knows about said “weird procedures.” Kunsel claims to know everything going on in the Shinra ranks and sometimes Zack just doesn’t want to know. It's why he sometimes ignores his emails and messages. 

“No one wants another Genesis,” Zack says with a grin. Genesis’ defection is much more serious than that and they both know it, but there’s no use in dwelling on it right now although Zack can’t help but sigh heavily at the memories of Genesis and Angeal. 

“Whenever you go off the deep end, just don’t include me in your weird love triangle,” Kunsel quips. “Don’t you already have that girl in Sector Five?”

“Aerith?” Zack frowns. He has been flirting with Aerith, and he’s been going down to the slums fairly often. 

“What did you forget about her after seeing another pretty face?” Kunsel laughs. Leaning back in Zack’s desk chair, he throws the crumb-filled cling wrap from the curry bread across the room. It doesn’t reach Zack’s bed, and drifts to the floor, landing on top of a pile of books. 

“You should really clean up in here, man,” Kunsel says. “It’s disgusting. Anyway yeah, I thought you were dating Aerith.”

“I don’t think so,” he says. Zack isn’t certain if he knew he and Aerith weren’t dating before he says this, but he somehow knows it as soon as the words leave his mouth. “It’s not like that.”

“You look surprised,” Kunsel says. He’s used to waiting for Zack’s brain to catch up with the rest of him. 

“I am,” Zack says. “Just a bit.”

***

“When I first fell through the roof, I thought you were an angel, honest,” Zack tells Aerith one day while trying to help her sell flowers in Green Park.

Aerith looks at him with a bright smile and bubbly laugh. “And I thought you had died.”

“No really, you were so pretty and the church was so pretty and—“

“Okay Zack, what do you want?”

“What!? I’m just saying.”

“You’re never ‘just saying’ anything. And you’re usually more straightforward with what you want. So, what do you need?”

Zack hesitates, brushing his fingers lightly against a yellow flower petal. He’s unsure of how to tactfully ask her, “Are we dating and if so can we not be because I met this beautiful boy in the Shinra army?” 

Fortunately, like with most things, Aerith is eerily perceptive. 

“Okay who is she?” Aerith asks with a sly grin. 

“Who is who?” 

“Who is the girl that put that look on your face?”

“What look?”

“This one.” Aerith steps back and places her hands on her hips, mimicking Zack’s stance as he rocks back and forth on his heels nervously, staring off into space. 

“I don’t look like that,” Zack says petulantly.

“I don’t look like that,” Aerith mimics. 

Zack sighs, running his hands through his air. “Look I’m sorry, okay. It’s just… I really like him.”

Aerith hums, raising her eyebrow as she turns away. She pretends to arrange flowers in her flower cart before turning back to face him. 

“I’m not going to pretend like I’m not hurt,” she says. She’s serious and he can see the disappointment in her eyes. “But I’m also not going to stop you from being with someone you obviously like.”

“I’m sorry,” Zack says lamely.

“Arghhhhhhh!” Aerith stomps her foot into the ground dirt of the park. It’s been packed so tightly from foot traffic that uses the park as a throughway rather than an actual park that Aerith’s stomp echoes. “Stop apologizing!”

“And you better bring him down here to meet me,” she adds. “You owe me that at least.”

He gives her a mock salute. “Aye, aye, ma’am.” 

“Don’t ever call me ma’am again,” she says. Somehow her tone sounds more threatening than anything he’s ever heard from Sephiroth.

***

It takes a lot of planning — Kunsel calls it stalking, but he really isn’t one to talk since he’s the one providing Zack with Cloud’s exact schedule — and running into Cloud “accidentally” for months, but Zack finally convinces him to come down to the Sector Five undercity with him to meet Aerith for a few drinks.

“Why am I meeting your girlfriend again?” Cloud asks. 

“For the last time, Spikey, she’s not my girlfriend. I’m not dating anyone!”

Cloud looks sullen, like he doesn’t believe Zack, but allows himself to be dragged onto the train platform for the quick ride to the Sector Five slums.

Aerith is delighted with Cloud, and immediately begins teasing him mercilessly. Somehow, she coaxes Cloud out of his shell much more quickly than Zack ever could. It makes him a bit jealous, but he swallows this down as they lie on the ground of Green Park, passing a bottle of whiskey between them in a brown paper bag. Cloud’s still too young to drink so Zack had to go out and buy several bottles for them to share.

“No one is going to pay attention to some random adults drinking in the park,” Zack had said upon returning with his purchases. “Not when they have so many other problems to deal with.” 

He had gestured at the rubble and debris around them that made up most of Sector Six. Aerith had frowned and told him to sit down next to the flower cart and shut up. 

Zack has never seen Cloud drunk before. The infantryman somehow becomes even more beautiful with red splotches appearing on his freckled cheeks. 

“Zack, I’can’t feel my nose,” Cloud slurs, rubbing it violently while slumping onto Zack’s shoulder. “Or my teeth.” Zack ruffles his hair affectionately and Aerith takes another swig from the bottle, raising her eyebrows suggestively at Zack. 

“I’m going to teach Cloud how to get into SOLDIER!” Zack yells into the darkness of Sector Six. Someone yells at him from the other side of the park to be quiet. 

“I can get in m’self,” Cloud mumbles into Zack’s bracer. 

“Awwwww, c’mon Spikey let me help! I can teach you loads of stuff! Angeal taught me—” Zack trails off as he remembers his former mentor. He misses Angeal desperately. 

“S’okay Zack. You can teach me,” Cloud says. 

The drunk infantryman reaches out to hug Zack and misses on his first attempt. Zack crushes Cloud to his chest and cries into his hair. Aerith giggles and prods them in their cheeks before wrapping her arms around them both. She then insists that they spend the night, despite whatever curfews they may have and the glare from her mother when they stumble into her house on Petal Lane. 

“Cloud,” Zack whispers loudly into the dark even though Cloud is tangled up with him in the same bed.

“What?” Cloud answers sleepily. 

“I like you,” Zack says simply. 

He rolls over to see Cloud’s face. His eyes gleam in the moonlight from the window as he stares back up at Zack.

“I like you too, Zack,” Cloud says. And before Zack can clarify that he means this romantically, complete with some sort of grand gesture that’s hopefully not too much like Genesis but still gets the point across, Cloud surges up and kisses him. 

Zack moans and immediately melts into Cloud, cradling the back of his head while licking into his mouth. He can feel Cloud’s erection rubbing into his thigh as Cloud grinds into him, gasping between kisses at the friction. Cloud is much more eager than Zack had thought he would be, and Zack has wanted him for what seems like forever. He grabs Cloud’s shirt and pulls it over his head, kissing him the entire time. Cloud is warm and pliant in his arms and he wants and wants.

“Wait,” Cloud gasps. Yet he’s still rubbing up against Zack and Zack doesn’t want it to stop. 

“Zack, we can’t,” Cloud protests again, although he doesn’t make much of a physical effort to get away. Instead he wraps himself tightly around Zack. Further tangling their legs together, he presses his nose against Zack’s rubbing it lightly. 

“We’re still in Aerith’s mom’s house.” Cloud scrunches up his face and attempts to look serious while still peppering Zack’s lips with kisses. “‘M not saying no. I’m just saying not now.”

Zack giggles. “Yea, that’s a good idea.”

He thinks of walking around the Shinra building hand-in-hand with Cloud, stealing kisses in the elevator, pressing him up against the wall of the combat simulator, stripping him out of his uniform piece by piece—

They drift off moments later. Zack only stirs once, when he feels a pair of warm lips on his forehead.

***

“‘Of course...I'll come back to you,’” Kunsel says, kneeling in front of Zack for dramatic emphasis. “‘Even if you don't promise to wait. I'll return knowing you'll be here.’ Just tell him that the next time you leave for a mission. He’ll know that you mean that you love him. Everyone knows LOVELESS.”

“Kunsel, that’s cheesy as fuck.”

His best friend stands up and shrugs, nonplussed. “That’s LOVELESS for you.”

“Now who’s being like Genesis?” 

It isn’t nearly as funny of a joke this time as it was before.

***

Modeoheim reminds Cloud of his own hometown, Cloud tells Zack on the helicopter ride over — so much so that Cloud removes his infantry helmet almost immediately after they crash.

“I needed air,” he says, looking a bit green. “And this reminds me of home. It’s… clean. Somehow.”

Zack nods. His fingers twitch and before he can stop them, he’s placing his hand on Cloud’s back, rubbing it in circles. He’s not sure how much Cloud can feel through his Shinra infantry uniform, but Cloud looks up at him gratefully and if Tseng has any commentary, he wisely keeps it to himself. 

If it was up to Zack, he would be all over Cloud all the time, but he knows that puts Cloud in an awkward situation since he’s technically a superior, even if he isn’t Cloud’s direct commanding officer. 

As it is, once he realizes that Tseng and the other surviving infantryman are lagging behind in the cold weather, Zack pulls Cloud ahead and kisses him behind a ravine.

They camp that night in the abandoned bathhouse — Cloud and Tseng both recovering from injuries and Zack stewing over Angeal’s death. 

“Zack,” Cloud says. His voice is low against Zack’s neck. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I know.” 

And Zack does know. It doesn’t make Angeal’s death any easier to accept, but he does know that there was nothing he could have done differently. Cloud hums and cards his fingers through Zack’s hair, tugging on them as Zack leans into his touch. 

“Hey Cloud,” Zack whispers after a while. Cloud hums again and waits for Zack to continue. 

“I don’t think you should go into SOLDIER. I can’t tell you why,” he says, squeezing Cloud’s arm tightly when he shifts, presumably to protest. “I’m sorry. You know I would if I could but— there’s something weird going on. Genesis, now Angeal. I don’t think what they’re doing to us is right.”

Cloud looks up at him in anger and confusion, but doesn’t say anything in response. 

Zack has always loved Cloud’s eyes, which are somehow just as bright as his own, despite no mako enhancements. He brushes his fingers against Cloud’s long eyelashes and kisses his forehead. 

“I love you, Cloud,” Zack says. After all his whining to Kunsel and Kunsel’s weird LOVELESS reenactments and talks of grand gestures, it’s really is as simple as saying it. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Cloud’s hand reaches up, intertwining his fingers between Zack’s own. “Zack,” he says. “You won’t ever lose me.”

***

_I was thinking about telling you once we were in my hometown, but it’s a little embarrassing, so I’m going to write it out and send it to you. That day in Modeoheim when you told me you loved me. I know. Remembering what you said that day gives me courage every day. Being with you gives me courage every day. I’m sorry I’m so bad with words. I love you, Zack_

Zack re-reads Cloud’s message to him several times on the way to Nibelheim, sending him beaming smiles and occasionally running his fingers through Cloud’s hair. He holds Cloud’s hand the entire truck ride to help stave off the motion sickness, only dropping it when a ruby dragon attacks their vehicle. 

This earns them a few odd looks from Lee, the other infantryman assigned to their four-man unit. Lee keeps nervously looking between the pair and Sephiroth as if Sephiroth is going to care about their relationship. 

He doesn’t have the heart to tell Lee that Sephiroth doesn’t pay attention to much of anything in anyone’s personal life, especially not now with all of the weird stuff going on in SOLDIER. 

Zack saw Cloud’s face when Sephiroth told them they were going to Nibelheim. He knows that Cloud has kept a lot of his childhood traumas unsaid, but Zack still wants to be there for Cloud as much as possible. It’s a routine reactor inspection, although something about Sephiroth’s demeanor sets him on edge. Zack’s fears only increase when Sephiroth talks about his family at the Nibelheim town gate. It's weird and uncomfortable and he hates it.

Their first day in town, Cloud refuses to remove his helmet for fear of being recognized by anyone in town, especially his childhood acquaintance who not-so-coincidentally happens to be their guide for Mt. Nibel. Zack doesn’t push him, but does convince Cloud to see his mother that evening. 

“I’m… really glad you’re here, Zack,” Cloud says to him as he takes off his helmet and knocks on the door of his childhood home. He looks like he's about to say something else, but closes his mouth instead and smiles, squeezing Zack's hand. Zack can’t help but puff out his chest with pride, squeezing back as the door opens. 

Cloud’s mother has unruly blonde hair exactly like her son and is significantly more talkative. She questions Zack endlessly about his life while ladling bowl after bowl of meat stew in front of him. Cloud doesn’t say much, but whenever he catches Zack’s eye, his smile is radiant. 

Zack can’t remember the last time he felt so warm. 

“I’m happy he found you,” she says when Cloud excuses himself to the washroom after dinner. “He doesn’t open up much. Take good care of him for me.”

Zack nods furiously. “I will. I love him.”

She smiles broadly at his declaration before reaching out to tousle his hair. "Good."

Cloud jumps on him as soon as they walk into their room at the inn, pressing him up against a wall and slamming the door behind him. 

“So this… is why… you didn’t… want to stay…” Zack mumbles into Cloud’s mouth between kisses. 

Cloud is warm and eager and stronger than Zack thought he would be as he all but throws Zack onto the bed. 

“You know Cloud,” Zack says, his voice hoarse between kissing and his own desire. “If you wanted to have your way with me, we could have done this a lot soo—“ His voice pitches up in a shriek as Cloud pulls his trousers down and sucks on Zack through the thin fabric of his briefs. 

“Cloud-AH. Just let me—“ Zack struggles with Cloud’s clothes, but manages to pull them off without moving around too much as Cloud continues to lick him, creating a large wet spot on the cloth before Cloud removes his briefs entirely. 

“I’ll admit,” Cloud pants as he strokes Zack’s cock with hands that have no right being as soft as they are for an infantryman in the rifle corps. “I have no fucking clue what I’m doing.”

Zack crushes Cloud into him for a quick kiss and presses their foreheads together roughly. “I don’t fucking care. Do whatever you want. I’ll tell you to stop if you don’t like it.”

Hours later, his body is covered in sweat and he withdraws from Cloud’s ass, flopping back onto the bed. Cloud whines next to him from overstimulation as Zack’s hands are on his softening cock, rubbing him gently. They lay beside each other, breathing heavily and tangled together happily. 

“Zack,” Cloud says breathlessly. “I love you.”

“Cloud, do you believe in fate?” Zack pants next to Cloud, emotionally overwhelmed. “I knew the moment I saw you in the mess hall.”

Cloud’s eyes widen and suddenly he’s giggling uncontrollably. “Zack,” he says. “You had fourteen pieces of curry bread.”

Zack bursts out laughing and the two of them laugh into the night, lying side-by-side in the inn’s small twin bed.

***

Two days later, Cloud kills Sephiroth and then dies in Zack’s arms. He doesn’t say a single word, but reaches his hand up to stroke Zack’s cheek before it falls limply onto his shoulder.

Zack closes his eyes moments later. 

Everything is black and red.


	4. Zack Fair (first timeline)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Zack may have met him before that, but he doubts this thought immediately. Later that night he’ll think that there’s no way he wouldn’t take notice of someone who looked like Cloud Strife, even in passing at the Shinra tower._
> 
> _“Me and Cloud here are both backwater experts!” he says, recovering from his stupor. “Oh yeah!”_
> 
> _Cloud tucks his helmet under his arm and grins up at Zack. In the distance, Tseng is saying something, but Zack walks forward with Cloud, wondering how he can put that same smile on the infantryman’s face again as soon as possible._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not crying, you're crying.

Zack Fair meets Cloud Strife in Modeoheim. 

Genesis troops shoot down their helicopter on approach — a hint that this mission isn’t likely to go smoothly, although everything has been wrong since Genesis defected. He misses Angeal. 

As crashes go, it isn’t the most painful thing he’s experienced but it isn’t pleasant. Still, they’ll all survive. 

Snow clings to the fabric of his uniform, his body heat melting it almost on contact. He lifts himself up from where he gracelessly face-planted in a drift and hopes the others didn’t see him. Tseng remains as unflappable as ever, whipping out his PHS without so much as a snowflake on his pressed suit. 

Zack clenches his fists at his sides. Tseng is a friend, but the Turk has always had an aloof aura that Zack has been unable to penetrate. Now that he knows that Tseng knows Aerith somehow, it’s almost an armour of condescension. Tseng has always known things that he hasn’t, but knowing Aerith is too coincidental. Aerith has nothing to do with anything. Tseng must be spying on him to ensure that he doesn’t go looking for Angeal. 

_”Did she tell you anything? Then I won’t either.”_

He still hears Tseng’s voice in his head, repeating endlessly. Zack hasn’t exactly sorted out his feelings about Aerith yet, but he’s drawn to her and wants a chance. He thinks of the pink ribbon he bought her and her gentle smile and sighs. 

“Well, at least we’re all in one piece,” he finally says, pushing down his confusion over Tseng. “We’ll be alright.”

“Thankfully, we have someone used to this kind of terrain,” Tseng says. 

The slight insult stings more after their awkward confrontation at the church. Zack tells himself that brushing it off is best. Better to let Tseng think that he too is unflappable, or at least not thinking about it all that much.

_Play dumb. You’re good that that._

“Yeah, yeah,” Zack says with an exaggerated shrug. “I’m a country boy.” He barely finishes speaking before Tseng assumes command. 

“Alright then. We would have reached Modeoheim by now if we hadn’t crashed.” Tseng brushes past him, walking forward up the mountain trail. “We’re going to need to make up for lost time.”

“Follow me then!” He walks ahead of Tseng, motioning for the other two infantrymen to follow. 

To Zack’s amusement — he knows it’s petty but cannot help it — Tseng and one of the other grunts immediately fall behind, trudging through the snow awkwardly.

“Yo! Don’t fall too far behind!” He doesn’t bother keeping the amusement and glee out of his voice as he calls back to them. 

The infantryman beside him chuckles. It’s a brief, abrupt sound.

“At least someone’s keeping up!” Zack jokes.

“Well, I’m a country boy too.” His voice is low and muffled by the scarf he wears to cover the bottom half of his face if necessary. 

_Thankfully, we have someone used to this kind of terrain._

Zack realizes that Tseng hadn’t been talking about him, he had been talking about this man.

“From where?”

“Nibelheim. What about you?”

“Me? Gongaga.”

The infantryman lets out another snort. 

“Hey, what’s so funny about that? You know Gongaga?”

“No, but it’s such a backwater name,” he says, holding his hand in front of his face to cover his mouth as he laughed. 

“Ditto Nibelheim.”

“Like you’ve been there.”

The statement stops Zack in his tracks. Most infantryman would be far too afraid to talk back to a first-class SOLDIER. He can’t remember the last time he was able to sit back and actually get to know someone at Shinra outside of the friends he already has like Kunsel. 

Hell, whenever he tries to talk to any of the infantry, they don’t say anything outside of “Yes, sir!” or “No sir!” In terrified squeaks, hero worship visible in their eyes. 

He has to get to know this kid better.

“I haven’t,” Zack says after shaking his head. “But there’s a reactor there, right? A mako reactor outside Midgar usually means—”

“—nothing else out there.” 

They say this in tandem as if they had been friends for years.

Zack _has_ to get to know this kid.

“Good news Tseng!” Zack calls back down the mountain. “Me and uh…”

He gasps when the infantryman removes his helmet.

“Cloud.”

Cloud’s cheeks are red from the cold and they puff out as he exhales loudly in the dry air of Mt. Modeo, creating white, visible breaths. His hair is a blond mass of disorganized tufts, sticking out in all directions. He has a stunned look on his face but a soft smile and freckles over the bridge of his nose. Bright blue eyes stare up at Zack expectantly. 

He’s beautiful. 

Zack may have met him before that, but he doubts this thought immediately. Later that night he’ll think that there’s no way he wouldn’t take notice of someone who looked like Cloud Strife, even in passing at the Shinra tower. 

“Me and Cloud here are both backwater experts!” he says, recovering from his stupor. “Oh yeah!” 

Cloud tucks his helmet under his arm and grins up at Zack. In the distance, Tseng is saying something, but Zack walks forward with Cloud, wondering how he can put that same smile on the infantryman’s face again as soon as possible.

***

Zack tries to track down Cloud in Midgar, but fails.

“You have a lot of stuff going on, hunh?” Kunsel asks one night as the two meet up in the lounge in front of the combat simulator. 

Zack looks out over the city as it glows in the darkness. Sometimes it feels like it’s always night in Midgar. 

“I guess,” he says. Kunsel hums, crossing his arms.

“I mean a boyfriend and a girlfriend at the same time?”

Zack knows Kunsel is only trying to lighten the mood but blanches at this statement. He wasn’t dating Aerith. They’d only gone out once. 

Still, Zack suddenly feels badly, like he hasn’t been paying attention as much as he should have. 

He wonders if this was Kunsel’s plan all along, to take his mind off of Genesis and Angeal and Hollander and whatever’s going on with the Shinra science department. 

“I’ll figure it out,” he says. 

Kunsel hums again, but doesn’t say anything else. 

The day before he’s sent to the Icicle Area again, Kunsel forwards him Cloud’s troop and barracks numbers.

***

When Cissnei tells Zack that Aerith is the last living Ancient, he understands why Tseng was so reluctant that day on the church steps.

He understands why Aerith seemed so warm and so distant at the same time, even for all of her playfulness. He hears her voice in his head, replaying all of their interactions as he fights Genesis copies on the beaches of Costa del Sol. 

He understands why she’s afraid. 

_”Who wants to see the sky? I don’t, that’s for sure.”_

_”I guess I’m not normal.”_

_”The sky frightens me. It feels like it’s sucking me in.”_

As Zack slices through another Genesis copy, he hopes he can show Aerith the sky one day.

***

Junon is more of a fortress than a city. Zack hates it. Fighting Genesis copies is numbing and he’s beginning to forget what Genesis was actually like.

He chases Hollander through the main passageway only to stumble upon Cloud dry-heaving against one of the reinforced concrete walls. 

“You’re Cloud!” 

Zack internally berates himself for being unable to come up with anything else — something that sounded smarter or perhaps he should have offered Cloud something to vomit into, although he doesn’t have a handkerchief or anything on him. 

“Wow, you remembered me,” Cloud says. 

Zack is a bit insulted. Of course he would remember Cloud and he tells the infantryman as much. “I’m happy to be working with you again.”

Cloud smiles, although he still looks a bit green. 

“Yeah,” he says softly. “Although my work is a little dull.” 

The infantryman sounds unsure of himself, as if Zack is going to bugger off and leave him here because his role isn’t interesting enough. 

“What are you talking about?” Zack all but yells. “Rescue work is an important task!”

He hasn’t been able to see Cloud whatsoever since he was immediately placed on leave by the SOLDIER offices. Zack had thought that it was Lazard’s doing, but according to Cissnei, Tseng, and Kunsel’s constant stream of emails, Lazard had gone missing a while ago. 

“Anyway, once we’re done, let’s grab a bite to eat. My treat!” The words leave Zack’s mouth before he can stop them. 

It sounds like a date. If Zack is being completely honest with himself — and he usually is — it sounds like more of a date than his date with Aerith. 

Cloud’s face lights up. “Really? That would be great!” He still sounds like he’s stunned that Zack would want to speak with him at all. Zack will have to try to fix this when they go out to dinner together. 

He wants the Cloud that teased him about how he pronounced “Gongaga” and being a backwater country boy. 

“Once I’m feeling better I would love to go!” Cloud speaks quickly but ends his sentences abruptly, like he’s unsure as to whether he should be saying anything, but the words trip out of his mouth anyway. 

Zack loves his voice. 

“But right now, just thinking about food is making me…” Cloud gags and Zack takes a step back. 

“I’m sorry Zack.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Zack says quickly. He wants to remove the doubt from Cloud’s voice by force. “Hope you feel better.”

Cloud smiles shyly. Zack stares back at him until Cloud begins to look a bit green again and turns back towards the wall, gagging. He reaches a hand towards Cloud as if to pat him on the shoulder, but withdraws it immediately when he hears shouting up ahead. 

Hollander is still out there.

***

The more Zack talks to Cloud, the more he’s sure that he loves him.

A small voice in the back of his head that sounds suspiciously like Kunsel tells him that he should be weary — that he’s projecting a mass of complexes onto someone and also may or may not be dating Aerith. 

That same voice also tells him that he’s trying to occupy his mind with petty love life troubles to distract himself from SOLDIER crumbling internally. 

Yet he sees the shock and fear on Cloud’s face when Sephiroth tells them that they’re going to Nibelheim. He ignores the side-eyed glances from the other infantrymen as he rubs Cloud’s back to stave off motion-sickness on the bumpy truck ride through the mountains. 

Cloud only throws up twice and tries to hide from Zack both times. 

“How does it feel to be home after all this time?” Sephiroth asks Cloud when they arrive at the Nibelheim gates. Sephiroth continues without waiting for a response. “I have no hometown. I wouldn’t know.”

“What about family?” Zack kicks himself for saying this, scuffing the steel toe of his boot into his own ankle. 

Sephiroth had been slightly off for some time now. He had always been the most difficult to read of the initial SOLDIER trio and now he was completely alone. 

“My mother’s name is Jenova,” Sephiroth said. “She died shortly after I was born. My father—“ Sephiroth begins laughing maniacally. His entire body doubles over as he covers his mouth with a melodramatic flourish that would have made Genesis proud. 

“Why am I talking about this?” Sephiroth asks, interrupting himself. “Let’s go.”

_Jenova… but that would mean…_

After being accosted by a weird girl in the town square, Zack turns his attention to Cloud, who hasn’t removed his infantry helmet. 

“It’s…personal,” Cloud says when Zack asks. His voice rushes out in one breath but ends in staccato, as if he’s biting back an explanation. 

“Weirdo,” Zack says with a small laugh. He fights the urge to reach out and take Cloud’s hand, flexing his fingers at his side instead.

That night he receives an email from Cloud thanking him. He rereads it in the dark, hiding the screen of his PHS under the covers.

***

For a small town, Nibelheim has a lot of monsters — far more than Gongaga ever did. He supposes that’s why they were sent on a mission to investigate the Nibelheim reactor.

Zack thinks back to his first conversation with Cloud. He wants to take Cloud to Gongaga one day just as much as he wants to show Aerith the sky. He wonders if Cloud visited his parents last night, but doesn’t get a chance to ask due to the amount of monsters they have to fight on the way to the reactor. The girl who was asking him all sorts of questions about SOLDIER, Tifa, is their guide and her martial arts skills are a surprising asset to the team. Zack wonders when this girl had time to study hand-to-hand combat so thoroughly. 

He wonders if Cloud knows it too, if it’s a Nibelheim thing. Zack doesn’t have time to ask any of this because Genesis appears once they’re in the reactor, spouting something about the Jenova Project in between LOVELESS lines. 

_”Am I…a human being?”_

That night, back in the Nibelheim Inn, Zack hears the anguish in Sephiroth’s voice over and over.

He yells and punches the bed. His fists sink into the duvet cover as the comforter and blankets give way willingly. It’s profoundly unsatisfying, especially when he wants to punch Genesis in the face for telling Sephiroth all of that. 

Cloud sleeps through it and doesn’t wake up until hours later. 

“Tifa’s safe,” Zacks says to him. It wasn’t the first thing that he wanted to say, but he knows that Cloud is probably concerned. 

Cloud’s face falls. “If only I were in SOLDIER…”

“SOLDIER’s like a den of monsters,” Zack says. He tries to keep the anger out of his voice but it still drips with derision. Cloud doesn’t belong anywhere near that. “Don’t go inside.”

Cloud’s eyes narrow and for a moment Zack thinks he’s about to fight him. The anger in his eyes gives way to confusion and he looks back up at Zack again.

“What happened?”

“I dunno man.” Zack runs his hand through his hair. 

_”Am I…a human being?”_

“I thought I knew but…” He sinks back onto the bed and yells. After a moment of staring at the ceiling, he asks Cloud if he knows Tifa. 

Something has been weird about Cloud this entire time. Zack would have assumed that someone like Cloud would have wanted to see his family and friends immediately, yet he hadn’t removed his helmet the entire time they had been in Nibelheim. 

Cloud curls in on himself at the question, digging his feet into the comforter on his bed. “Sort of…” he says softly. 

“Talked to her?”

“No.”

“I’m sensing some issues here. Shouldn’t you do something?” Zack can’t help but push, even as Cloud turns away from him completely.

When Cloud refuses to answer, Zack again resists the urge to hug Cloud, to tell him that he’s fine the way he is and that everything will be alright. 

Kunsel always said he was a sap. 

Pacing around the room, Zack says whatever pops into his head. It hasn’t really steered him all that wrong in the past. 

“I’m with SOLDIER so fighting’s all I do. Sorting things out is someone else’s job.”

 _The Turks._ Zack briefly thinks of Cissnei and Tseng. He hopes Aerith is safe. 

“What’s going on? Who is the enemy? It makes no difference to me!” Zack is screaming by the end of this, sobbing into the blade of Angeal’s Buster Sword. 

“Hey Zack?” Cloud’s voice is husky but still soft. “You know…I’ve never seen you use that.”

It cuts through his thoughts, grounding him. He remembers what Angeal said. He remembers the speech that Cloud had written about in his email — that it had inspired Cloud. He had inspired Cloud of all people. 

_Kunsel was right. I am a sap._

“It’s a symbol of my hopes and dreams— no, it’s more. That’s right, I had almost forgotten.” Zack turns away from the large blade and sees Cloud still looking up at him. His face is sincere in the low lamplight. 

“Thanks Cloud,” he says in a hushed tone. 

Cloud looks at him, still confused. 

_Adorable._

Before Cloud can see his blush, Zack flops back onto his own bed. “G’night!” He can feel Cloud’s eyes on him, but the infantryman says nothing as he gets up and turns out the lights. 

After what feels like hours, Zack whispers Cloud’s name to see if he’s still awake. 

“What?” Cloud asks sleepily. 

“You know…” Zack says. “We hadn’t really fought together before until now. It was pretty cool, right?”

Cloud laughs. “You’re a lot stronger than me, Zack. I was knocked out almost instantly.”

Zack thinks of Sephiroth and Genesis and Angeal and shakes his head. “I don’t know about that. You’re strong too.”

***

Years later, a tearful Zack will apologize to a catatonic Cloud for telling him to finish what he started — to kill Sephiroth. In the moment, even as blood runs into his eyes, Zack is proud.

***

Every day, Zack hears Hojo or one of his assistants mutter something about what a failure Cloud is — that his body has taken to the combination of Jenova cells and mako too eagerly and he’s already been poisoned well beyond proper brain function.

He too is deemed a failure for opposite reasons — his body is already so used to mako, it’s not taking on any additional enhancements even with Jenova cell increase. Unfortunately, this means he’s lucid throughout. When he opens his eyes, he sees Cloud through a the greenish haze. 

Zack didn’t know that people could still scream when they were unconscious. He clenches his fists, the grit of the mako rubbing between them, and vows to strike Hojo for every scream.

***

Angeal appears. Or at least, Zack thinks Angeal was there.

Broken glass crunches beneath his feet as he stumbles over to Cloud’s mako tank. The infantryman falls into his arms immediately after the tank is drained.

Cloud feels lighter than Zack thought he would.

***

Zack talks to Cloud throughout their journey to Midgar. He asks all of the questions he wanted to ask without waiting for the answers. He tells Cloud about Genesis and Banora. He takes Cloud to Gongaga, but it’s nothing like what he had imagined. He apologizes for telling Cloud to kill Sephiroth.

Cloud doesn’t wake up. He doesn’t know if Cloud will ever wake up.

Zack doesn’t tell Cloud that he loves him. 

“We’re friends… right?” Zack asks Cloud as they hitch a ride in the back of a truck. The truck rattles as it goes over another bump and Cloud bonelessly falls into Zack’s arms. 

Zack props him back up as always, resisting the urge to kiss him.

***

“Stay here, Cloud,” Zack says, ruffling Cloud’s hair like he always wanted to.

He hopes that in a different lifetime, or if things had been different, they would have at least become close friends. 

The battle itself is an infuriating draw. He stops the Shinra troops but he’s left to bleed out in the dry grasslands surrounding Midgar. 

When Cloud comes to him, it’s raining. “Zack…”

He coughs, unable to fight back his smile that Cloud is awake. Blood drips into his eyes. It’s like Nibelheim all over again. 

“For…the…both…of…us,” Zack says. 

“Both of us?” Cloud’s voice is more hesitant than it was before, dragging out softly rather than short, fast, staccato bursts. 

“That’s right,” Zack doesn’t have time to say what he wants to say. He doesn’t even know what he’s saying now. “You’re gonna…”

“You’re gonna…”

Tears mix with the blood and rain. He reaches out for Cloud’s head, pulling him close like he always wanted to.

“Live.”

_You’re gonna live Cloud. I’m so happy._

“You’ll be…my living legacy.”

Cloud is crying too. When Zack releases him, blood drips from Cloud’s face.

_When did Cloud…? Oh…that’s my blood._

He lifts the Buster Sword and hands it to Cloud, desperately hoping that the infantryman understands. 

“My honor, my dreams…they’re yours now.”

_Do you understand, Cloud? This is my love. I love you._

“I’m your…living legacy,” Cloud whispers.

Zack smiles and closes his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This will be angst with a happy ending, I PROMISE. 
> 
> The entire story has been plotted and outlined, so it's just a matter of writing and getting there. ^ ^


	5. Zack Fair (??? timeline)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Zack, go.”_
> 
> _“I won’t leave you! I didn’t leave you behind in Nibelheim and I’m not leaving you now!”_
> 
> _Cloud smiles brightly. He lifts his hand to Zack’s cheek._
> 
> _“No,” Cloud says. “I have to find you.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted Tseng to make it. Just once. (Although going with the theory of so many timelines that they're all living through, Tseng would have made it more than a few times, I suppose.)

Zack Fair meets Cloud Strife in Nibelheim. 

The last memory Zack has is of casting Sephiroth’s corpse into a pool of mako at the bottom of the reactor. He can’t remember what happened before that. Zack wakes up floating in a mako tank.

He doesn’t know if Sephiroth is alive or dead. 

The tank reminds him of his first SOLDIER infusions — sickly-sweet and almost like drowning. Back then, Professor Hojo had given him supplementary shots to presumably counteract the mako. 

Zack had never asked him what they were exactly. 

There’s a boy in a Shinra infantry uniform floating in a tank beside him. Zack doesn’t know him — Shinra has tens of thousands of infantrymen — but he has the most striking hair that Zack has ever seen.

***

Time compresses.

Zack doesn’t know whether it’s day or night, whether he’s awake or asleep. He floats in the mako and grimaces as Hojo strokes his fingertips over the boy’s tank. 

He can hear Hojo whispering things to the infantryman like “My precious specimen” and “You’re such a good boy, aren’t you?” 

It makes him feel sick. Hojo never says anything to Zack, although the scientist occasionally glances over at his tank with disdain. 

Zack doesn’t know if he can be sick in a mako tank. He also doesn’t want to find out. 

For all that he’s been floating here — he has no idea how long it has been, it could be days or months — Zack doesn’t feel any differently than when he was a SOLDIER. 

He supposes he’s still technically a SOLDIER now, although he doesn’t know what that means anymore. 

Angeal…

Genesis…

Sephiroth…

They had all been first-class SOLDIERs. They had all been experiments. Maybe they too had found themselves in this room on Hojo’s operating table, or back with Hojo or Hollander on the top floors of the Shinra tower.

Zack is bit thinner than he used to be and exhausted, but those small changes aside, he’s still himself. Angeal and Genesis hadn’t changed until later. Maybe he’ll find himself transformed in a day. The boy still looks like just a boy. 

Whatever Hojo is doing to them, it’s not having any sort of effect that he can see or feel. 

Yet the boy never wakes up like Zack does and he screams from an operating table in the centre of the room half the time, and whimpers through the night. The boy has never been responsive or seemed awake, save for his cries when Hojo or his assistants are experimenting on him. 

Zack wonders what he did to end up here. 

He doesn’t remember the boy from SOLDIER. 

Zack would remember if they had met before.

***

It takes five attempts for Zack to successfully break the glass. He stumbles forward and collapses onto the ground. Shards of glass cut into his skin and through his knit shirt, mixing with the syrupy mako that clings to his body. The stone floor is covered in glass and mako and blood.

He acts as if he’s dead on the floor. It’s easy, his body is already so tired despite not having moved much at all. When the assistant draws close and moves to pick him up, Zack strikes, knocking the assistant to the ground with a swift kick and incapacitating him with a well-placed punch. 

The boy is heavy in his arms and slippery from the mako. 

Hours later, they stumble out of the mansion doors.

“Look at that, Spikey,” Zack says, half dragging, half carrying the boy on his shoulders. “You can see the stars so clearly here.”

The night is cold and crisp. The boy’s eyes are open — a piercing mako green even in the darkness — but he doesn’t respond.

***

The boy wakes up in the Turks’ helicopter.

“Zack…Fair?”

He grabs the blond boy’s hands, squeezing them tightly. “You know me?”

The boy’s head lolls back onto one of his shoulders. His body is weak from disuse and exhaustion. He’s also a bit green and Zack moves back slightly in case the boy is about to be sick but doesn’t let go of his hands. 

“Everyone…does. All of the…first…class…guys.” His voice is rough from disuse and Zack can’t help but make a shushing sound, pressing his finger to his lips. Zack hears an accent like their Nibelheim guide, Tifa. He thinks maybe this is why this boy was pulled for an experiment, although he hadn’t been a part of their reactor assignment group. 

“What’s your name?” Zack asks. 

“Cloud…Strife.”

Zack looks at Tseng for confirmation, but the Turk simply watches them with a blank expression on his face. 

“I have some letters for you, Zack,” Tseng says. Before Zack can ask who they’re from, Tseng dumps a large stack of letters into his lap.

“What the? There must be a hundred letters here!”

“Eighty-eight to be precise,” Tseng says. He pulls out one last envelope from the pocket of his suit jacket. “Here’s the final one. Letter Eighty-Nine. I watched over Aerith like you requested.”

Zack stares at Tseng, opening and closing his mouth several times without saying anything. All he can hear is the whirring of the helicopter blades and rushing wind. 

“How…long?” Cloud asks. Tseng turns to him but doesn’t respond.

“How…long were we…?” Cloud looks directly at Tseng. He’s still shaking unsteadily but stares into Tseng’s eyes with defiance. Zack gives his hand what he hopes is an encouraging squeeze.

“Four years,” Tseng says.

***

Zack goes to visit Aerith at the church. Cloud sleeps on one of the broken pews while Zack tells Aerith everything that’s happened since he left Midgar. She smiles at all of the right places and even covers her giggles with her hand a few times.

Yet, she looks sadder than his memories. Her smile is still warm but smaller somehow and she doesn’t look up from the ground once. 

He feels like he’s talking at her.

“I got your letters,” Zack says desperately as their conversation feels like it’s winding down. 

“You don’t have to read them,” she says, hopping up from where they were seated on the floor near the flowerbed. Cloud snores softly from a pew behind them.

“Aerith I’m still in lo—“

She seals his lips shut with a press of her index finger, winking with another smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. 

“You’re not,” she says, finger still pressed against his lips. She looks like she’s about to cry. 

“Trust me, Zack. Please?”

***

It’s convenient that Tifa’s first job for them is changing water filters in the neighbourhood because the apartment she offers them has a leaky faucet.

“I’ll fix it,” Zack says, pouting at Cloud’s skeptical frown. “I know how to fix it I swear!”

“Whatever. You better not break it,” Cloud says, crossing his arms across his chest. There’s a small smile beneath his scowling exterior. 

Zack bumps his head twice on the porcelain sink basin before he successfully changes the filter and tightens the valve underneath. 

He groans as he stands up but smiles as he feels Cloud’s arms snake around him. Cloud’s breath is hot against his shoulder and he clings to Zack’s back like he’s trying to press as much of their bodies together as possible.

“Hey Spikey, do you think we could get some decor in here?” He doesn’t know what to say now that he’s faced with the reality of sharing a life and a bed with Cloud. “Really make it our own place, you know? Maybe a poster or something.”

“Zack, I—“ Cloud’s hands twitch at his sides. He looks like he’s about to cry. “Thank you.”

Zack crushes Cloud’s mouth against his own. Cloud’s lips are chapped and he makes a small noise of confusion before sighing into Zack’s mouth.

“You’re welcome, Spikey,” Zack says when they finally break apart. He gasps against Cloud’s hair and neck, drawing deep breaths, trying to memorize what Cloud feels like and smells like. 

“Every time. I’ll save you every time.”

Cloud bursts into tears. 

“Let’s go help Tifa, okay?”

***

Everything goes according to their plan until Shinra’s robot malfunctions. Its lasers tear through the interior of mako storage. Debris narrowly misses Zack.

He turns to Cloud to celebrate their good luck and realizes that Cloud is buried under it, directly in front of where they planted the bomb.

“I thought…that this time,” Cloud says, blood trickling down the side of his face.

“This time? What are you talking about Cloud?”

Blood bubbles from an open wound above Cloud’s eyes and Zack presses his hand onto Cloud’s forehead. His fingers tremble. They’re too warm. Everything is too warm and sticky. It reminds him of Nibelheim. 

“Don’t worry Zack, I’ll find you.” Cloud is slumped against the heart of the reactor. The timer on the bomb reads 7:49. Somewhere on the latticework above him, Barrett and Jessie are screaming. The reactor is going to explode. 

Zack refuses to move his hand from Cloud’s head. He’s trying to stem the bleeding but his hands are shaking too hard. There’s too much blood he has to get Cloud out of here somehow.

“Zack, go.”

“I won’t leave you! I didn’t leave you behind in Nibelheim and I’m not leaving you now!”

Cloud smiles brightly. He lifts his hand to Zack’s cheek. 

“No,” Cloud says. “I have to find you.”

“You have to find me?” Zack asks. “I don’t have to find you? Cloud I don’t understand. Cloud!”

“Yes.” Cloud’s fingers loosen in his as he slumps forward, sinking to the ground in a graceless heap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last fully sad/angsty setup chapter before solutions appear in Aerith's perspective. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read/kudos/comment. It means a lot.


	6. Aerith Gainsborough (REMAKE)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“My money’s on Zack,” Tifa says._
> 
> _Aerith snorts loudly into her drink. “Trust me, I know Zack intimately. He is a baby. My money is on Cloud.”_
> 
> _“But Zack’s so…” Tifa finishes her statement by waving an arm gracefully through the air with a flourish while muddling mint leaves in mason jar with the other._
> 
> _“Yeah, it’s to cover up the fact that he’s a big baby,” Aerith says._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was by far the most difficult chapter to write yet. Hopefully Zack and Cloud's final chapters come more smoothly. ^ ^;
> 
> Spoilers for Remake dialogue and plot points. You probably shouldn't read this if you mind being spoiled for Remake.

Gast and Ifalna meet her at the beginning of a new loop. 

What was once a dream is now an oddly domestic family meeting — one that can only happen in the liminal space of the lifestream. 

Aerith tells them about any differences but is also swept up in minutiae. She laughs as she tells them about Zack’s surprising innocence and cries at Cloud’s strength. They tease her about her growing friendship with Tifa. 

Ifalna listens quietly while Gast hums and nods. He’s the type of person who desperately wants to solve the problem where Ifalna simply lets Aerith’s words wash over her and offers advice when prompted. 

She’s between the two of them, Aerith thinks — between wanting to solve the problem immediately and standing back to recognize others’ emotions. 

They always stand side-by-side. Ifalna’s leans down — Aerith once giggled at the fact that her mother was taller than her father, earning mock-stern looks from both of them — to rest her head against Gast’s shoulder. 

Aerith knows that they rarely had time to simply be with each other when they were alive. She doesn’t know whether they feel trapped or fortunate by the nebulous time they have together now but they seem happy amidst everything. 

“Stay safe,” Ifalna always says. “And don’t worry about us. We’ve returned to the planet together.”

“We will always love you, Aerith.” Gast ends the dreamlike meeting with this affirmation. 

Aerith wakes up crying in her room in the Shinra Building. 

Her wall is covered in chalk flowers now, one for every time the world has upended itself and started over. She’s lost count and she could count the flowers if she wanted to but Aerith is long past thinking that the number matters anymore. 

Every time she dies.

Every time she returns. 

The plate over Midgar brings an odd comfort. Before they set out on their journey, before she’s locked on a path that drags her closer to yet another death and rebirth, Aerith feels like she can affect lives. 

She can go to the Leaf House and help Biggs or Miss Folia. She can give flowers and herbs to the local doctor to help treat the people in Sector Five. She can wander aimlessly through and help people with whatever they need at that particular moment. It's nice enough.

Aerith is still alone, but at least she has the illusion of helping others.

***

Aerith cannot remember the number of the specific loop when she began meeting with Reeve Tuesti. She only knows that during the first iteration of doing so, Reeve was far more helpful and bonded to Marlene.

”It feels manipulative,” she says to Ifalna at one of the beginnings. “Like I’m influencing him against his will.”

Ifalna nods. “Why don’t you talk about this with me when we’re in the building?” she asks. “We both remember, after all.”

Aerith frowns, crossing her arms across her chest. It’s an affectation she has picked up from Cloud. 

If Ifalna or Gast notice this, neither of them say anything about it. 

“It seems safer this way,” Aerith says.

_Here I can just be, without having to pretend that I don’t know anything of what’s to come._

Ifalna nods as if she can hear what Aerith doesn’t say aloud. 

“Do you not think that Shinra is exerting their own influence over him? Is he not manipulative too?” Ifalna asks as she strokes Aerith’s hair, long slender fingers slipping through the strands and braiding it loosely. 

In this moment Aerith is a child and a grown woman and something else entirely that’s both of these and also neither of them. 

“Is this not another attempt to influence something somewhere in order to incite change and save the planet?”

Aerith sighs, leaning back into her mother’s touch. “Is that what I’m doing wrong?”

“My dear child,” Ifalna says, sounding like the voices of the Gaia herself. 

“You’ve done nothing wrong.”

***

The flowers grow back every cycle.

They grow back prouder and somehow more fiercely — standing their ground as both Zack and Cloud fall on them, lifting them up. They barely flinch when Reno walks over them, meeting his bombastic swagger with their own pride. 

In the latest loop, days before she is meant to meet Cloud again, Aerith drops one in the street. 

She watches as someone carelessly walks over it without seeing. It springs back slowly and she picks up up, dusting off the muddy pattern of a boot tread. The shadows are always here now, whispering at the periphery of her thoughts. Their track becomes narrower and narrower with each passing loop. 

_”There ain’t no getting off of this train!”_ Aerith hears in Barrett’s voice, despite never having heard him say this to her directly, but Barrett never accounted for the shadows and whispers. 

Aerith places the flower underneath the leather strap of Cloud’s sheath and watches him fight off Shinra infantrymen with unnecessary flourish and flair. Giggling at the sight, she runs away from him as soon as he dispatches the first wave. She catches her breath in a nearby alleyway before walking slowly back to the Sector Five undercity. 

The damage from the first bomb is significantly worse this time around.

***

Her childhood often skips by quickly. Sometimes she would argue that she has more agency, not less, as a child than she does as an adult, but Aerith is trapped regardless of age. Once she and her mother escape Professor Hojo, Elmyra Gainsborough tries her best to give Aerith a normal life. The Turks keep an eye on her but as long as she’s alive don’t really press the issue all that much.

With each successive childhood lived, Aerith stops trying to act like a normal child. Aerith knows Elmyra blames herself for this, for not integrating Aerith properly enough or something to that effect, but she cannot bring herself to reach out. The other children have always rejected her because she was different, so Aerith learns to lean into that and keep herself outwardly happy but distant. 

Everything is regarded with a purposeful distance and this cycle is no different until Aerith is sucked into the darkness of Eligor while trying to talk to the children trapped by him in the Train Graveyard. It reminds her of the Lifestream — a place that exists but not in a physical way. She can sense the other children’s fear and it bleeds into her own. 

“I’m right… here,” she whispers aloud, choking back a loud cry before giving up on maintaining any sort of appearance. 

There’s no one else here, after all. Cloud and Tifa are still in the Train Graveyard, presumably fighting the monster, or maybe they found a way through to get to the pillar unhindered. 

Perhaps the whispers are only after her and she’s been the one holding them back this entire time. 

_If I’m gone, then they can finally move forward._

The ground is cold beneath her knees and seeps into her body. She sobs into her hands.

“Aerith!” 

She hears Cloud before she feels his arms around her, pushing her out of the way of a falling shipping container. Tifa’s hand on her shoulder floods her body with the warmth that was sapped out moments earlier. 

“Hey. We found you,” Tifa says before offering her hand to Aerith. Aerith takes it and allows Tifa to pull her up from the ground in an oddly courtly gesture. 

Blushing, Aerith chokes out, “I guess you did.”

Tears streak down her cheeks. Tifa looks at her for what feels like hours, concern and relief in her eyes. 

In that moment, Aerith forgets that the pillar is about to fall. She forgets the enemy in front of her. 

She is found.

***

Marlene Wallace is exactly where she always is, but this time she’s more resistant and afraid. Aerith has never had a problem convincing Marlene to go with her before and suddenly feels well out of her depth in what should be an easy situation.

Get Marlene. Exchange the promise of Marlene’s safety for her own capture with Tseng. Tseng is always reasonable and predictable. He never deviates from his path. 

She hadn’t expected Marlene to deviate either, but in hindsight this was far more predictable. Marlene is a scared child. Regardless of how well-behaved she is, there’s no reason to assume she would do the same thing every time. 

In a way, the fact that she always has gone with her before is more surprising to Aerith than this sudden difference. 

When Aerith reaches out to comfort Marlene, she inadvertently opens her mind. Marlene gasps but stops crying. Myriad images flash behind Aerith’s closed eyelids as she holds Marlene in her arms.

She wonders if Marlene saw what she saw. 

Aerith holds a finger to her lips, as if she’s sealing a secret between the two of them. 

Marlene nods and finally smiles, taking Aerith’s hand.

***

Aerith waits for Cloud on the hill in front of her house. She moves more freely through his dreams now, despite Hojo’s glass cage.

“How is this… Is this a dream?” Cloud asks. 

Optimism pours out of Aerith now. It comes out as playfulness. 

“Maybe,” she says coyly. “You tell me.”

“You okay?”

“Don’t I look it?” She says, twirling above the flowers with an extra flourish. “I used to live in the Shinra Building back when I was really little.”

“Your mom told us.”

“Right, so it kind of feels like I’ve gone back to my childhood home, you know? Honestly, it’s not that bad.”

_You already found me. I know you’re coming._

“So what, you want to stay?”

_Oh Cloud. You always did ask the wrong questions._

Aerith stops just short of laughing aloud. “C’mon Cloud. Don’t be silly.”

“Your mom’s really worried too,” he says. She hears what he doesn’t say — he’s really worried — and can’t resist teasing him. 

“‘Too?’ So you’re worried about me?” 

As she steps forward, Cloud takes a step backwards. Again she stops herself from laughing at him. He really is too funny. 

“Of course I am,” he says breathlessly. 

There’s something else in his voice that she recognizes all too well. 

“I’m sorry about that,” she says, appropriately chastised. “Really.”

The souls returning to the Lifestream rise like an aurora over Sector Seven. 

“Is that…?”

In the glass elevator where Hojo has placed her, Aerith rises from her seat and kneels on the floor. She prays for the lives of every single person who died. 

She apologizes for her inability to reverse their fate. Somehow she can feel someone’s hand on her shoulder — maybe Tifa, maybe Ifalna, maybe one of the many who died — giving her warmth. 

“Everyone dies eventually,” she tells Cloud when she’s finished. 

“I suppose.”

“So we need to make the most of the time we have. To live our lives the way we want to live.”

_This is the time, Cloud. This is when you will break the cycle._

It’s a shadow of her speech to Wedge. “Every minute,” she says. “Every moment matters.”

“I’ll remember that,” Cloud replies. 

“Good,” Aerith says. She turns to face Cloud. “So…”

“You need to embrace this moment, right?” Cloud asks. 

“I’m glad I met you Cloud. I really am. I’m grateful for all of the words we’ve shared. For all the moments and the memories.”

_This time. And every other time._

Ifalna had been right. She hadn’t done anything wrong and neither had Cloud. None of them had. 

There’s so much else she wants to say, but she knows that he won’t believe her. Not until he remembers Zack. 

“You’ve made me more happy than you know,” she says. “And I’ll always cherish what you’ve given me. But… but whatever happens, you can’t fall in love with me.”

Cloud’s face falls and she aches to reach out and comfort him. As he twists away from her she reaches up and brushes her fingers against his cheek. He leans into the touch unwittingly. 

“Even if you think you have, it’s not real.”

_Remember him. Please._

“Do I get a say in all this?”

He’s hurt and angry. She understands this too, all too well. 

“It’s almost morning,” she says, feeling her soul being pulled back to the Shinra Building. “Time to go.”

“I’m coming for you.”

_Good._

“If that’s what you want,” she says. “Thank you.”

Aerith closes her eyes and slumps back against the cool glass as Hojo taunts her. 

She sees Zack on a precipice, leaning on his sword.

***

The rain falls. She moves towards Tifa, taking her hand and squeezing it with a full-body flush.

“Zack…?” Cloud falls to the ground, holding his head in his heads. 

Tifa steps forward to comfort him but Aerith squeezes her hand tightly, stopping her. With her right hand, Aerith places her index finger onto her lips in a shushing motion. 

“He needs to remember on his own,” she whispers. 

Tifa blushes and nods, intertwining her fingers in Aerith’s.

***

“My money’s on Zack,” Tifa says.

Aerith snorts loudly into her drink. “Trust me, I know Zack intimately. He is a baby. My money is on Cloud.”

“But Zack’s so…” Tifa finishes her statement by waving an arm gracefully through the air with a flourish while muddling mint leaves in mason jar with the other. 

“Yeah, it’s to cover up the fact that he’s a big baby,” Aerith says. 

At a corner table, a flushed Cloud Strife leans his head onto Zack Fair’s shoulder. 

“I win!” Aerith yelps with glee.

Tifa shakes her head. “No way! That doesn’t count as a move. He’s just tired.”

They continue to watch as Zack goes completely stiff, watching in awe as Cloud nestles his head onto his chest. 

Aerith sighs and reaches out across the bar. Tifa takes her hand and squeezes it, smiling brightly. 

“Forget it,” Aerith says as Zack blissfully stares at Cloud’s face. “They’re both hopeless.”


	7. Zack Fair (REMAKE)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“For the both of us,” Zack says, stroking Cloud’s wet hair. He resists the urge to press a kiss to Cloud’s forehead._
> 
> _“We’re gonna live. We’re gonna go to Midgar, and we’re gonna live. Together.”_
> 
> _Cloud nods._

“Cloud!”

Zack wakes up screaming. 

Gasping for air, he claws at the dirt and mud underneath him, unable to move his body.

He had thought that he was going to die. 

A brief flash of Cloud, wielding the Buster Sword, comes to mind — the sun shining through the rain on the same cliffside where he fought Shinra and lost. Aerith is at Cloud’s side, along with a group of other people that Zack does not recognize. 

“Zack…?”

Everything shakes. Everything hurts. Someone is grabbing his shoulders.

“Zack! Zack!”

It’s raining. Water runs in cold rivulets down his face and neck. His uniform is soaked through. 

“Zack!”

He opens his eyes and the worried face of Cloud Strife slowly comes into focus. The shoulder shaking immediately makes sense. Cloud has propped himself up over Zack’s body, his hands resting on each side of Zack’s collarbone. 

_Cloud’s alive. Thank fucking Gaia he’s alive._

Zack smiles. It hurts, but his mouth stretches into a wide grin. 

Cloud is leaning into Zack as if he can barely keep himself upright. Blood is smeared on Cloud’s face and hands. 

If Zack was in better shape himself, he would make some sort of joke or sexual innuendo about Cloud pinning him to the ground. Instead, he motions to sit up, which causes Cloud to shift away, bringing his arms up around Zack’s back. 

He feels a small, warm rush of blood behind his ear. As he rises, he feels his skin tighten and draw taut underneath his clothes. His entire body is encrusted with blood and mud. 

Everything aches.

The rain beats down on his face and he closes his eyes for a moment — the image of Cloud looking at him worriedly, expectedly, is already burned behind his eyelids. He rubs at his cheeks, hoping that the rain washes away some of the dirt and dried blood. 

His mouth tastes like iron and he runs his tongue against his teeth, checking to see if any are missing. 

As Zack stands — Cloud still looking at him with a concerned and confused expression — the enormity of their situation comes back to him. The Shinra troops. There must have been thousands of them. 

The ground is littered with broken bodies. The Buster Sword lays on the ground next to Cloud. Angeal’s dream. 

His dream… and Cloud’s dream.

Zack stumbles under the weight of it as he straps the sword to his back. 

“Can you walk?” Zack asks. 

It takes a moment for Cloud to respond. The infantryman is still visibly affected by his forced mako intake in Nibelheim and Zack clenches his fists with rage. He doesn’t even realize he’s gone into his own sort of mental haze until he hears Cloud calling his name.

“Zack,” Cloud says. 

The blond man reaches up towards Zack. After another pause, Zack quickly grasps Cloud’s forearm and attempts to haul the smaller man up off of the ground. Cloud’s legs are still splayed in the mud and one of his feet is in a brackish puddle stained with blood. 

As he pulls Cloud to his feet, Zack notices that Cloud’s legs aren’t moving. He wonders how Cloud had managed to reach him, when he had sworn he had left Cloud behind a rock formation away from the gathered Shinra infantry. 

Cloud’s forearms are scraped and bloodied. He must have dragged himself to Zack when he saw Zack fall to the ground.

“I thought…” Cloud says slowly. Cloud’s voice hangs in the damp afternoon air, slurred and unsure. 

“Zack,” he says as he wraps his arms around Zack’s torso, pulling them together loosely. “I thought you were dead.”

Zack thinks of assuming his usual bluster and telling Cloud that it will take more than the entire Shinra army to kill him. He is a SOLDIER after all. 

Instead, he embraces Cloud as tightly as possible. The younger man lets out a small whine, but buries his face in Zack’s chest. 

“For the both of us,” Zack says, stroking Cloud’s wet hair. He resists the urge to press a kiss to Cloud’s forehead. 

“We’re gonna live. We’re gonna go to Midgar, and we’re gonna live. Together.” 

Cloud nods.

***

That night, Zack realizes that the only thing Cloud will say, other than the fearful statement that Cloud thought he was dead, is Zack’s name.

Zack wonders if Cloud will ever be the shy SOLDIER-wannabe who caught his eye in Modeoheim, and then shakes his head at his own idiocy. 

Of course Cloud isn’t going to be the same person. He’s already not the same person after what they’ve both been through. 

As they keep trudging forward, Cloud slips and and out of consciousness, head lolling against Zack’s chest and feet dragging on the ground behind them. He occasionally whimpers loudly in the darkness, and Zack cradles Cloud’s head underneath his chin, whispering that everything will be okay.

“I can’t wait for you to meet Aerith, Cloudy. I know I told you about her but she’s gonna love you. Everyone’s gonna love you. We’ll become the best mercenaries that Midgar has ever seen!”

Zack curses himself for not being able to carry Cloud. His injuries aren’t as bad as he had initially thought, but he’s still wounded and unable to fully support Cloud’s entire weight. 

The two stumble forward, arm-in-arm, towards Midgar.

“We’re almost there. Aerith can help fix you up too! She’s good like that. Probably the best healer I know of, even Sephiroth— well, Sephiroth never really cared about healing much other than the fact that it was necessary, I suppose.”

“Zack!” 

A sharp cry from Cloud interrupts his thoughts. 

“You okay Cloud? Are you hurt? You need to rest?”

Cloud shakes his hand and points up towards the sky. Before Zack can respond, he’s blinded by a large spotlight. 

He hadn’t heard the propeller blades in the air, too preoccupied with talking to Cloud about what they would do once they got to Midgar. Zack wants to kick himself for being so stupid and unobservant. 

He’s supposed to be a SOLDIER. And not just any SOLDIER, one of the best, whatever that means now. 

“Tseng…” Zack hisses at the man as he jumps down from the Shinra-branded helicopter. Zack squints and thinks he can see Rude behind the controls in the cockpit. 

The young Turk holds both of his hands in the air in a surrender gesture. They’re empty. Zack grits his teeth. 

“I’m not your enemy today, Zack,” Tseng says. “I’ve come to take you to Midgar.”

“Bullshit, if you think I’m going to—“

“I have letters for you. From Aerith. I’ll leave you at the church. I promise. Quite honestly, Zack, I don’t have the time to deal with you right now. I have other things to attend to.”

Tseng’s voice is clipped, with more emotion than Zack remembers, but Tseng doesn’t say anything further. Instead, Tseng stares at him blankly, hands never moving from where he lifted them. They frame his face in a way that's more domineering than submissive. His long hair whips around him like a cape, flapping in time with the helicopter blades. He cuts a formidable figure against the spotlight, suit pristine and well-tailored as always. 

Throughout the entire exchange, Cloud looks on with confusion, rapidly turning his head from Zack to Tseng and back to Zack again. 

All three of them stand still until Cloud stumbles against Zack again, unable to hold himself up any longer. Cloud’s head falls on Zack’s shoulder. 

“Fine,” Zack finally spits out. “If you’re lying I’ll make sure none of us make it to Midgar.”

It’s a bluff. He’d never endanger Cloud’s safety like that and Zack knows that Tseng has already realized this. 

For that matter, although Zack isn’t certain as to whether he can trust Tseng, he doesn't particularly want to fight or kill the Turks either. Until recently, he had considered Tseng a friend. Maybe he still is.

Tseng nods and motions for Rude to descend close enough for them all to board. Zack refuses to let go of Cloud for a second, guiding him into the back of the helicopter where Reno is lying lazily on the floor. 

“The final letter from Aerith,” Tseng says, handing him a yellowed envelope. “I watched over her like you asked.”

***

Rude drops them off in front of the church in the Sector Five Undercity. Tseng doesn’t say anything further to Zack, but nods once before climbing back into the helicopter cockpit.

“Th-thank you,” Cloud says weakly. It’s lost in the dust kicked up from the undercity rubble and whirring of propeller blades. 

Zack can’t help but ruffle Cloud’s hair fondly. It’s either that or flip off the helicopter, which is already making its way up through the collapsed section of Sector Six. 

“You’re too polite, Cloudy.”

***

“Helloooooo? Zack?”

He feels a finger poking into his cheek and immediately sits up.  
“Cut it out Aerith!”

“Someone’s grumpy in the morning. After I was nice enough to let you stay here too.”

“Hunh?”

Zack looks around wildly. He’s in the church. Sunlight filters from the hole in the roof where he fell through years ago onto the flowerbed.

_Where’s Cloud?_

“Where’s Cloud?” His voice is rough and the question comes out a lot harsher than he meant it to.

Aerith rolls her eyes. 

“Your boyfriend is right over there,” she says, as if he should have known. 

She’s right. If Zack had bothered to look down and to his left, he would have seen Cloud laid out on a church pew, sleeping peacefully. 

He couldn’t remember the last time he saw such a relaxed expression on Cloud’s face. 

“Is he…?”

Zack’s hand pauses over Cloud’s hair midair and he freezes, hoping that Aerith can pick up his meaning. Asking if Cloud is okay is obviously a dumb question since Cloud is definitely still suffering from the effects of mako poisoning. 

“Tseng watched over me,” Aerith says, rather than answering his question. “ For the past four years. He said that you told him to.” 

Her eyes narrow, brows knitted together in annoyance. “I’m not sure whether I should be flattered that you wanted to take care of me after dumping me without saying that was actually what you were doing, or annoyed that you thought I would need help.”

Scratching the back of his neck with a sheepish smile, Zack nods. He doesn’t know what to say.

“Sorry, Aerith.”

She sighs loudly. 

“He’ll be okay,” Aerith says with a genuine smile. She reaches forward to brush Zack’s hair from his eyes. 

“We all will be.”

***

“I know how to fix it I swear! There’s just not a lot of room over—SHIT!” Zack’s head crashes into bottom of their sink basin and the apartment shakes.

“Are you okay?” 

He feels Cloud’s arms wrap around him from behind, pulling Zack out from underneath the sink. 

“Just give me one more minute. I almost have it.”

The water filter finally comes lose, falling onto the floor with a clatter.

“See?”

He turns to Cloud with a proud smile on his face. Cloud looks back at him with a blank expression, the corners of his mouth twitching in mirth.

“Zack one, water filter zero,” Cloud says dryly. 

Wrapping his arms back around Cloud, Zack looks down at him, pouting. Cloud sighs. 

“Maybe we should get a bigger place. We can afford it now.”

Since Cloud had been allowed to go out on his own mercenary runs, their income had been slightly less tight — surely enough to move out of Tifa’s apartment complex and into something a bit larger. 

And yet, Zack didn’t want to move far away from Seventh Heaven or Tifa. Cloud’s recovery had been rough on them all, and more than a few times, Zack had found himself calling Tifa over to help subdue a thrashing, sleepwalking Cloud. 

It was nice to be surrounded by people they could trust, especially if Shinra decided to get nosy again. 

“It’s a one-room apartment, Zack,” Cloud continued, hugging him tighter. “I think our rooms in the barracks were nicer.”

“Don’t let the landlady hear you saying that shit. She’s scary as he—mmph!”

Cloud suddenly kisses him. It’s brief but hard. Zack feels Cloud rise onto the tips of his toes to press their foreheads together.

“Cloud…”

The younger man tilts his head back down and sucks on Zack’s lip. His hips buck involuntarily against Cloud’s thighs. 

“If you think this is going to distract me,” Zack says, pushing Cloud onto the bed softly. “It’s working.”

***

Zack is drunk.

He can’t help the goofy grin on his face as Cloud’s head lolls onto his shoulder, cheeks flushed with alcohol. Cloud’s face is warm and the blush makes his freckles all the more prominent.

Zack is in love. 

From across the bar at Seventh Heaven, he hears a loud “I win!” from Aerith as she begins to argue with Tifa about something. 

Cloud murmurs something incomprehensible, knitting his brows together but smiling. 

“I love you,” Zack whispers into Cloud’s hair. 

Cloud’s eyes remain closed but his smile widens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only Cloud's final perspective left! Which should tie everything in together from the first chapter to the last. 
> 
> After this I might just do a series of snapshots from Zack and Cloud's mercenary life as a kind of alternate timeline to the original FFVII canon.


End file.
